About The Arkansas Garden
What is The Arkansas Garden?
The Arkansas Garden is a collaboration with Randy Forst (Horticulture Specialist) and Melissa Johnson (Arkansas Extension Social Media Manager). The idea started as a "what if?" Instagram experiment that blossomed into a robust set of monthly garden guides and a blog.
As home gardening has become an increasingly popular hobby, means of becoming more sustainable, and simply a way of life in recent years—especially after the COVID-19 pandemic and as grocery store prices continue to increase—more and more people are turning to gardening as the answer.
We wanted to make an easy-to-use guide that Arkansans can pull up every time they ask themselves, "What should I be doing in my garden right now?"
Meet Randy & Melissa
Randy Forst, MA
Randy is our Master Gardener Coordinator and our extension consumer horticulture specialist.
Melissa Johnson, MA
Melissa is the Social Media Manager at the Arkansas Cooperative Extension Service.
Acknowledgements
It is important to note that we did not do this work alone. To create these Garden Guides and other gardening info found here, we have compiled some of the best tips and tricks from the enormous wealth of knowledge that is our website. We'd like to take a moment to acknowledge the notable people, entities, and publications we used as inspiration to base these garden guides off of, for without their content, The Arkansas Garden would not have been possible:
University of Arkansas at Pine Bluff's School of Agriculture, Fisheries, and Human Sciences's Year-Round Home Gardening Planting Guide, Janet Carson's In the Garden series, Baxter County's Monthly Garden Checklists, Faulkner County's Grow Your Own Groceries series, Arkansas Extension's Home Gardening Series Fact Sheets, and more.
Thank you all for the work that you have done, and for sharing your insights on home gardening! Your work has inspired us to create this series.
